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From the Director
Daniel Herwitz, Director and Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities
The Institute for the Humanities is now in its third decade, and I in my tenth year at ship’s helm. We are first and foremost a research institute which offers year-long fellowships to Michigan faculty and students so that they might pursue their scholarly writing, creative non-fiction, poetry, architectural design, theorization of public health, work in the history of medicine, digitized documentary film, and more. We solicit projects which call for engagement from across the humanities rather than those which, however fine, are best pursued in the hermetic isolation of library or office. This gives meaning to our weekly Fellows Seminar, in which each fellow’s work is considered from the diverse perspectives offered by others. In any given year we will have fellows writing biography, history, literary studies, essays, poetry, short prose, and writing for a variety of audiences. For graduate students, the non-hierarchical attention paid to their dissertations from broad quarters of the humanities opens their horizons and raises their confidence. For faculty, the seminar intensifies work, breaks disciplinary routines, enhances prose, and broadens domain. The University of Michigan is a vast, cosmopolitan university tucked neatly into a tiny town, and the institute aims to heighten the cosmopolitan character of our faculty’s fine work.
Our visiting fellowships allow scholars, film critics, journalists, to take up residency at Michigan in a way that contributes to disciplines from Classics and archaeology to linguistics and urban planning; artists to develop new art projects for our museum-quality gallery; and many to play a role in the articulation of our projects. Over the last third of a century the institute has become a centerpiece for research in the humanities at Michigan, purveying innovation in the humanities through cross-pollination with the arts, and partnership across the university with architecture, music, the social and medical sciences, public policy, journalism, law, business, and the University Musical Society. We have mounted projects on democracy and the media, the ruination and regeneration of modern cities (Detroit), global impoverishment and inequality, HIV/Aids, refugees and diasporas, the cultural politics of heritage, while also attending to opera in the Americas, avant-garde American music (Michigan generated), and most recently, digital scholarly communication. In every case the point was not simply study, analysis, understanding, but intervention, whether by doctors, policy makers, architects, artists, journalists, or practicing critics. Our gallery has become as central to our projects as our seminar rooms and writing spaces, and this web site is morphing into more than our calling card and information bank. It is a work in progress which we want to become a central purveyor of project and a central arm of interaction with our academic and broader publics.
This website is, like the humanities, a work in progress. It serves many purposes. It is a library (archive, record), a how-to guide, (how to apply, how to arrive), and a glimpse into what our fellows are doing and thinking, up close and personal in abstract digital form. It is meant to demonstrate our mission and to be a working picture of us in action. And it aims to reach multiple publics, from our peers to universities worldwide, from our friends and donors, to whoever happens to enter it with the quick touch of a digital click. The humanities have many values, some highly tangible, others beautifully intangible. One of its values is to seek clarity: clarity of prose, understanding free of cant, fundamentalism and hyperbole, understanding of the world in its glory and blemish, clarity through the long-range lens of history and the close up of lucid description, clarity through dextrous use of prose at a moment when language is flattening into a global English of email and internet (Hi Guys, cool, go for it, awesome). The humanities want to slow time into rumination where uncertainty is recognized and possibility imagined in a world reeling in rapid transaction and lightning multi-tasking, where research consists of two minutes on an internet site, perhaps this one. Our use of the web is then not without difficulty, since the web speeds everything up, and we slow everything down. We are stern taskmasters, demanding rigors of contemplation, but also celebrants of the imagination, wishing to remain conduits for the pleasures of experience. A website cannot be a question mark but the role of the humanities is to remind its publics that the music of life is American composer Charles Ives’ unanswered question. If you our readers have any good ideas about how our website might provide information, library, road maps, glimpses into our activities while also turning itself into a question (thus revealing the humanities at work) we’d love to hear from you!
Moreover the values of the humanities are also binding and synergizing ones: it is the humanities which have in modern times served as the point of reflection on the university, it is the humanities which have the privilege and duty to bring together disparate forms of thought and research to the task of understanding the world. We have tried to do something of this in our projects. To do these things well the humanities must remain as self-critical of their own tendencies towards insularity, posturing, defensiveness, arrogance and rank incomprehensibility at times. They must agree that they occasionally appear ludicrous, and live with that. They must continue to unmask their own relations to power in order to speak truth to power. Since endless verbiage is another chronic flaw of the humanities and I am highly liable to it, I’ll stop here! But not without thanking those foundations and beloved donors who have through their generosity made our fellowships, programs, lectures, gallery, public projects, and funding capacities possible. It is to you we owe everything. We can only repay it by doing our work in the best way we can. Please weigh in on that also.
